Today Parallax came out to MAKE HQ and let us test drive a number of their cool toys. They set up their quadcopters, y-copters, and hexcopters, hooked their ELEV-8 to an Intova camera, and used the video to fly with a first-person perspective. We pulled the feed into a streaming video, and had a great bird’s eye view of the O’Reilly/MAKE campus. A copter only fell out of the sky once, and they had it up and running again in no time. But let’s face it, crashes are a lot of fun to watch. Parallax also showed us their Propeller BoBots and Eddie, a Kinect-equipped robot they’ve been working on. Here’s the video so you can check out all the robot action for yourself.

l would have thought the Parallax crew would have taken the opportunity to talk more about the unusual architecture of the Propeller chip during the discussion of programming tools. The way the 8 individual cores work is pretty much designed for real-time process control.

(Not affiliated with Parallax, just a bit of a computer architecture enthusiast.)